


Elemental Experimentation

by CobaltCorvus



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Bending (Avatar), Gen, Introspection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-23
Updated: 2019-03-23
Packaged: 2019-11-28 16:21:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,785
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18210686
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CobaltCorvus/pseuds/CobaltCorvus
Summary: "It didn’t happen on purpose, Zuko swore later. Personally, he felt like blaming the others for all of it, with their damned openness that he doesn’t know how to deal with, and Uncle for his doggedly discerning teaching over the years. But in the end, blaming the others wouldn’t change what happened so he’s got no one to point fingers at except himself."Or the Gaang rubs off on Zuko and he's grumpy about it.





	Elemental Experimentation

**Author's Note:**

> As part of the Avatar Baang, I figured some Zuko appreciation was due and I love experimental bending ideas so this is the culmination of that thought.

It didn’t happen on purpose, Zuko swore later. Personally, he felt like blaming the others for all of it, with their damned openness that he doesn’t know how to deal with, and Uncle for his doggedly discerning teaching over the years. But in the end, blaming the others wouldn’t change what happened so he’s got no one to point fingers at except himself. 

He didn’t notice the first time. It was only a training session with Aang, the usual constant tug-of-war between distractions and the forms they were supposed to be practicing. One moment they were working their way through the dragon’s dance and the next Aang was wreathed in the smoke pouring from his hands. 

He wiggled his fingers, creating whirls in the grey wisps that were sublimating off of him, forgetting all notions of practice immediately. Zuko opened his mouth to call him back to attention but he couldn’t  deny the ache of their exercise settling across his shoulders and maybe a break would do them both good. 

Aang didn’t look up from his new-found skill of imitating a coalstack and instead turned to that age-old futile task: catching smoke with his hands. Settling down on one of the logs surrounding their training area, Zuko watched with head propped on hand and prepared to be amused. 

He remembered how much such a thing had frustrated him, almost a decade ago, when he’d attempted the forms he was meant to be mastering and produced nothing but discolored smoke and not the smallest lick of flame. It had been disheartening, a sign of his failure and a mark of ridicule. Something he couldn’t control. 

Aang brought his hands together, collecting the smoke between them with slight gusts of air. Zuko supposed it was fitting that an airbender would be one who could step over the line of what was possible. He recognized the way Aang’s eyes narrowed, the crook of his fingers as he slowly brushed the wisps of pale grey in the direction he wanted. Concentration furrowed itself across Aang’s brow until he was scrunching his face up so much Zuko had to wonder if he could even see what he was doing. A snort escaped him just as a swirling ring formed between Aang’s hands. 

“Zuko, look! I did it!” Aang bounded over to him, the gently rotating loop of smoke almost blown away by the speed of his steps but he somehow managed to keep it intact. “Now if I add rocks…” 

“This is firebending practice, not earth or airbending practice,” Zuko muttered, knowing already that he wasn’t going to chase after Aang. Perhaps this would simply have to be a lesson in control or precision or some other tenet that he could use to justify skipping the rest of the day’s drills.

As Aang set to work on whirling the small pebbles he’d pulled up out of the ground and adding them to the stream of smoky air, Zuko glanced down at his own hands. He’d never tried producing smoke on purpose, and he had a sudden itch to give it a try. 

It was an odd sensation to do something wrong on purpose, especially something he’d worked so hard to do right in the first place. The familiar warmth that came with firebending tickled his fingertips as he tried to keep the fire repressed without tamping it down entirely. The smell came first, surprisingly, of something burning before a thick plume of smoke rose from his palm. 

He passed his other hand through it, finding a slight heat to the haze as if it rose from a real campfire. It was unexpectedly relaxing, nothing like the anxiety of seeing it when he was a child. 

Curling his fingers in the way he’d seen Aang do, he concentrated on the warmth that radiated with the smoke and felt it flicker in response. He almost closed his hand in surprise, the column of grey stuttering from his shock before it billowed out again when he called it forth. The more he focused on the way it languidly rose through the air, the more he could feel its shape in his mind, the currents that ran through it. It was perhaps the oddest thing he’d ever felt, the way it almost mimicked fire with its flickers and unpredictability. 

He tried pulling it back in, to contain it, but the smoke dissipated into nothing. Curious now, he glanced over at where Aang was poking holes in his own insubstantial smoke with miniscule rocks, grinning all the while. 

Watching the Avatar, Zuko let out a contemplative sigh. There was something to be said of experimenting, of taking detours and tangents, of having some fun with it. Puffing out his cheeks, he sought to find that hazy warmth again and blew. Smoke passed from his lips in streams, speckled with embers glowing in the shadow of the trees. He almost inhaled before thinking to breathe through his nose instead, wary of coughing from his own creation. 

Seeing the way it wove through the air in curlicues and ethereal strands, a burst of elation rose inside him along with it. Now to see what he could do with it. 

Taking a deep breath, he puffed out another bout of smoke and tried to channel Aang, to channel his sense of fun. There was nothing Aang couldn’t twist into a game or a wild ‘adventure’. 

Zuko held still in case a stray movement messed up the process and as the smoke rose in front of him, he tweaked its path through the air. Just small nudges, it barely felt like he was doing anything with how gossamer thin the connection felt but it slowly drifted into shapes that might pass for a fat turtleduck, or a fire ferret. 

He was just easing the fin on a sea serpent into place when he felt Aang’s eyes on him. 

“Let’s have a contest! I want to try a lotus flower or maybe a Kiyoshi frowny face!” Aang’s exuberant shout was at odds with the way he slowly lowered himself in a crouch opposite Zuko. His grey eyes traced the edges of the smoky shapes and his trademark open-mouthed smile slid onto his face. 

The training session was well and truly foiled by now, Zuko wasn’t even going to deny it. But maybe it was a mark of how much Uncle had affected him over the years that he stubbornly clung onto the idea of teaching through any means possible. It had worked on him, eventually, so why not on the Avatar himself?  
“You can practice your breathing while you do and don’t bend any other elements,” he ordered. Despite it all, he was already thinking of whether he could make a dragon out of smoke before the call for dinner came. 

 

~*~

  
  


Zuko didn’t expect to find Toph in his mother’s old garden, leaning against the collapsing corner of the south wall with her meteorite bracelet tracing lazy shapes into the air in front of her. The sun spilled over the broken bricks beside her onto the only patch of green in the entire yard, a clump of weeds with bright pink flowers and spiny leaves. 

“Hey hothead, your garden needs some serious work.” The comment was punctuated with a heel dug sharply into the dust at her feet. Stepping over the rocky outcropping that had sprung up in front of him, Zuko took a seat next to her and looked down at the bay just visible through the break in the wall. 

“I’ll let my mom know about it when I find her,” he said, wondering if she’d even want to come back here. He had a handful of good memories, but even the one of this garden was hazy as smoke and just as hard to grasp. “If you wanted to remodel some parts of the house, feel free. Or demodel even.”

Toph grinned, sliding her feet across the ground, as a pillar rose up in the center of the yard and resolved itself into the shape of her in a triumphant pose, complete with boulder hefted in her hand. 

“My contribution for when she gets back, a statue of the real Melonlord gracing her garden.” Grabbing her still-twisting bracelet from the air, she stretched it between her fingers like sticky taffy. “What was it like? When you met the dragons?”

Zuko fell silent at the sudden question and found himself staring at the stone Toph’s large belt buckle and interestingly defined muscles. He’d almost have thought it looked like the Ember Island Player’s version of Toph, buff and tall despite the reality sitting next to him. She was larger than life in many ways, but sometimes it was startling to remember she was really only twelve. 

“Why do you ask?” he finally hedged, if only to have more time to figure out how to put it into words. He’d been speechless then too and nothing had changed since, how did you describe what they’d seen or what they’d felt?

“I guess I want to know if they were like the badgermoles. They didn’t speak to me, but I felt like I knew what they meant when they moved the earth and shook the core of the mountain.”

The badgermoles… He’d heard of them, had considered them to be legend until now like the dragons and sky bison were, but he’d been wrong about those too. Running his hand along the sunset-goldened terracotta beneath them and feeling the warmth they still leaked, he thought of the solemnity he and Aang had faced, and the momentary panic at the zenith of the mountain facing such ancient beings, and the colors of the fire that had surrounded them. 

“The dragons were the same, they showed us what they wanted us to see.” He looked over at her and sighed, kneading his forehead as he wracked his brain for some way to make his words make more sense. “I mean, like all the different things fire can be.”

“Besides fire? Last I checked you still can’t bend lightning like your psycho sister,” Toph said, drumming her feet against the brick wall and sending tremors along the foundation in a steady beat. 

Her bracelet lay between her fingers, odd spikes and whorls jumbled together into a mess of a shape. Reaching out, he paused before he touched it. 

“I’ll try to show you.” He poked the sharp end of a spike, gingerly. “With this.”

Toph passed it over, barbs and all. 

“It needs to be flat.”

Spreading out her fingers like she was pressing down a scroll or the pages of a book, Toph bent the metal into a sheet as thin as paper. Zuko looked along the edge, discreetly seeing if it would bend , but it remained as straight as an arrow. 

Placing it on his knees, he held up a finger and focused on the sun warming his back, the waning strength that nevertheless burned all the same. A jet of fire appeared at the tip of his index finger, red as the crushed bricks beneath his shoes. 

That was good enough to start. 

He’d never been an artist but drawing on metal with only a pinch of fire turned out to be easier than he’d expected. It burned a clean trail across the sheet, turning from a curling half-moon to a jagged squiggle. Concentrating, he pushed the heat higher, hotter, until it turned from red to a brighter orange and seared the metal in a line of sizzling sparks. 

Toph leaned closer, face turned toward her statue while she held the edge of the plate in her hand. 

“I can tell there’s a difference,” she muttered, voice as hushed as he’d ever heard it. 

Zuko took that as his cue to keep going. Careful to angle the flame away from her, he slowly pulled in a breath as he sought to raise the temperature even more. Azula could do it without breaking a sweat, he could remember their teachers’ excited and awed whispers when she’d first turned her flame blue, the sign of a true prodigy. The flame wavered at a clear orange, before finally tipping over into a pale purple bordering on white. It bit into the metal with an audible hiss, scorching the metal into patterns that glowed in the afterimage of its sizzling wake. 

By now, he’d abandoned the jet of flame and instead drew with a searing corona haloing his finger, pressing it against the metal like he was fingerpainting. He could feel the heat in the metal, both from touch and as a fire encased underneath the surface, seething inside the sheet and a hairsbreadth from his control. 

A thought rocked him back on his mental heels as he realized the similarity to how Toph had once explained her discovery of metalbending. Seeking out the element, in whatever form or shape it took and reaching out for it, bending the edges of what people thought was possible. That was Toph’s modus operandi in the end. He wondered how close metalbending and firebending could get, how thin the line was that separated them and if this was what Aang meant about the balance that he felt between all of the elements. 

“I like it.” Toph broke the silence, pulling Zuko from his reverie as he lifted steaming fingers away from the design now marked on the asteroid metal’s surface. He couldn’t capture what the dragonfire had looked like exactly, but then again that wouldn’t do Toph any good anyway. But the harshly etched lines were formed from what he’d learned from them, the range of color and heat that fire could present and the control it took to keep the flame inside you.

“I mean, you’re not Aang-level, have you seen his noodle portrait of Ozai?” Toph continued, “That’s talent. But you got a spark, hothead, I get what you were going for.”

Zuko looked down at the burned lines and handed the sheet back to her, shaking his hand in an effort to cool it back to normal. As soon as she touched it, the metal rolled up into a scroll and wrapped itself around her forearm in a wide band, the edges of a deep groove showing along its face. 

She ran her fingers along the burn ridges and smiled, huffing out a laugh before socking him in the shoulder. 

“You still owe me a fieldtrip, don’t forget.” 

“Yeah, I know.” He glanced at the statue again, before nudging her back.

“Shouldn’t you have made that boulder a melon?” 

“Good point, hothead, I’m on it.”

  
  


~*~

  
  


The next time wasn’t as lighthearted of an occasion. His fingers were growing numb as he watched Katara pull the girl, little more than a child, over the edge of the ice floe and into their boat. 

It had started as an excursion to show him ‘how the water tribe has a good time’ and went downhill from there faster than if you’d used an otter penguin as a sled. Sokka’s reassurances of how often he and Katara had gone out on their own before they met Aang did nothing to reassure Zuko. With that much water around, he thought his nervousness was rather warranted. 

And he’d been right. Two hours in and the only thing they’d fished out was a child who looked on the verge of death. 

“Zuko, hold still. You’re making the boat shake.” Katara’s voice was as calm as ever, steady as the ocean and just as unwavering. Her hands traced the girl’s body and pulled water out of the furs and cloth that bristled with frost. The face hidden under the hood was a sickly ashen brown, the lips purpling amidst shallow breaths. 

Zuko grabbed hold of the boat’s sides, struggling to come up with something to do. He could only watch as Katara took the extracted water and blanketed her hands in it before trying to heal the girl with an expression that defied resistance. A familiar glow spilled over the worn wood of the boat, flickering in synchrony with Katara’s graceful curl of her hand from the girl’s brow down to her feet. 

Katara was the embodiment of the dichotomy between water and ice, how it could turn from something that gave life to something that could steal it away just as insidiously, always with the same gentle but unwavering force. She could turn what flowed from her hands to protect and fight to something that slipped inside your body to heal or to hurt. She refracted as much as the surface of a stream, deeper than it looked. 

But the crease along her brow only deepened. 

“I can’t heal what’s not damaged. We need to get back to the village,” she finally declared, looking up at him with a gaze that could chisel rock. “Watch her, I’ll steer.”

Zuko didn’t argue, only shifted his weight forward until he sat next to the girl in the middle, leaving the stern free for Katara to stand up in and spread out her arms. 

As the boat lurched forward with the swell of a wave spread out behind them, Zuko checked the girl’s breathing. It was alarmingly shallow, with her skin as cold as shadowed marble. Wrestling his way out of his parka, he laid it over her and hoped the layer of fur would do some good. Unfortunately, it wasn’t as thick of a coat as it could have been; after the Boiling Rock, he’d found it was easier to endure lower temperatures as long as he conserved his energy. And sitting around in a boat hardly counted as exercise. 

Gingerly resting a hand on the girl’s head, he tried to imagine how Katara would do it, how she managed to fix what could not be seen. His first attempt produced a sweaty palm inside his glove but nothing more. It did no good for him to be warm unless he could share it with her as well. Heating up the air around her would do no good either, not with the breeze blowing by as they sliced through the frigid sea waves. 

It was a foolhardy idea but he’d always gone for those anyway. It was almost his trademark. 

Taking his glove off, he held his palm an inch away from the front of the girl’s parka and pictured the way Katara moved. He’d seen her do it hundreds of times now, had felt it when she healed his own wounds too, but what paltry comparison was that to truly knowing how to do it, and being able to. 

His fingers grew cold and stiff as he focused on what felt stupid and most of all impossible.Containing the spark inside his own body, protected from the outside and unquenchable, was different than to kindle it in someone else’s. 

He wanted to close his eyes, keep himself from seeing his own clumsy movements, but he thought of new forms and old advice. The first motion was too fast, rushed and embarrassed. On the second attempt, he forced himself to slow down, to keep each awkward jerk of his hand as he watched himself play pretend. By the third, he could feel the drag of a current against his fingers, of something catching in the girl’s body and drifting with him for just an instant, numbing the tips of his fingers in just that instant. Her peaceful face reminded him of Azula’s, when she’d been young enough to sleep peacefully. 

The fourth time, he searched for the snag that he’d felt before and gently pulled it up to the surface from her core deep inside, coaxing it slowly from its kernel with a promise of returned warmth. Starting from the forehead and down to her wrapped fur boots, he pushed the cold away inch by inch in waves of as gentle a heat as he could muster, the tendons in his fingers aching from the tension of fine control and the energy draining from him. His thoughts narrowed to the glowing current from the girl’s body he thought he could sense, spreading like a river when it widens down her limbs in a warm flow of heat. 

The boat bumped into the jetty with enough force to throw him against the side and jarred his concentration into scattered embers as the girl was lifted out of the boat and carried away by a team of healers and who could only be her parents. Zuko waited until his balance felt ready for dry land, or as dry as it could be in the south pole, and stepped onto the dock in a daze. 

A hand across his back and Katara’s face swam into view in front of him, smiling even as she steadied him. 

“Takes a lot out of you, huh? I’ve been there,” she said, pulling his arm across her shoulders and leading him back towards the tent they had been staying in. “How does it feel to steal my moves?”

“You can have them back, they don’t fit me very well,” he muttered, eyes straining to stay open against the fatigue settling into his bones. It had crept up on him, too immersed in what he’d been trying to do to see what he was using up in the effort, and now Katara’s hand across his own felt like the faintest of pressures while a swarm of scorpion bees seemed to prick at his numb skin. 

She’d helped him like this once before, the night he’d fallen to Azula for the last time and had risen from there to Firelord. It had been thanks to her that he still breathed the sooty air of a burning city and saw his sister’s descent into crazed anger. He’d thought he knew what effect his choice to join the Avatar had had, but he’d been wrong, been blind to what they taught him, to what they changed in him, to what they made him see more clearly. And it happened more times than just what he can clearly remember, it happened during the travels on Abba, during silly antics and the scrapes that they got into, in the little moments and the hidden ones. And Uncle would have been proud.

“Maybe once you sleep this off, I can give you a lesson or two on what  _ not _ to do.” 

They stepped over the threshold into the room with fire-warm furs inside and his nod was lost to the covers of the bed, Aang’s excited questions failing to penetrate his hearing as he blinked up at the ceiling. 

“It’s harder than it looks,” was all he managed to say before he fell into an exhausted slumber.


End file.
